Book News
Everything’s all White.
Betty White will write two books reflecting on everything from aging, sex and celebrity to her animal friends at the zoo as the 88-year-old continues riding a wave of popularity.
White will write about lessons learned in her decades-long Hollywood career with a focus on the past 15 years in the first book, “Listen Up!” while the second, “The Zoo and I: Betty White and Her Friends,” will feature stories and pictures of animals at the zoo.
“As much as I love what I do for a living in show business, I love writing even more, . . . so I’m thrilled to be working on not only one new book but two of them,” White, a longtime board member of the Los Angeles Zoo, said in a statement.
G.P. Putnam’s Sons will publish “Listen Up!” early next year, and “The Zoo and I” will be released in 2012.
The Emmy Award winner, who has a career dating back to the early days of live television, hosted “Saturday Night Live” in May, delivering the late-night show one of its highest-rated episodes ever.
First Lines
From “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” one of the titles in “First Thrills,” edited by Lee Child
It was eighteen sixty-five when the terror came to Douglas Island.
Eighteen sixty-five when Johnny came home.
Naturally, it was a time when few people cared what was happening on a small, barely inhabited southern island off the coast of South Carolina.
So much tragedy had already come to the country; there were so many dead, dying, maimed, and left without home or sustenance that a strange plague descending upon a distanced population was hardly of note.
Unless you were there, unless you saw, and prayed not just for your life, but your soul.
The war was over, but not the bitterness. Lincoln had been assassinated, and all hope of a loving and swift reunion between the states had been dashed.
Brent Haywood, Johnny’s cousin, had made it home the week before. A government ship — a Federal government ship — had brought him straight to the docks. He limped. He was often in pain. Shrapnel had caught him in the right hip, and he’d be in pain, limping, for the rest of his life.
Brent had been a prisoner a long time, and told me that he hadn’t seen Johnny since Cold Harbor, and that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to see Johnny; he hadn’t known that his cousin had survived until we had received the news. “There’s something not — right about Johnny,” he told me.
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